ASRock DeskMini 110 mini-STX PC Review
by Ganesh T S on June 8, 2016 8:45 AM ESTPower Consumption and Thermal Performance
The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 1080p display being driven through the HDMI port. In the graphs below, we compare the idle and load power of the ASRock DeskMini 110 with other low power PCs evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran Furmark 1.12.0 and Prime95 v27.9 together. The numbers are what one might expect for the combination of hardware components in the machine.
Our thermal stress routine starts with the system at idle, followed by 30 minutes of pure CPU loading. This is followed by another 30 minutes of both CPU and GPU being loaded simultaneously. After this, the CPU load gets removed, allowing the GPU to be loaded alone for another 30 minutes. The various clocks in the system as well as the temperatures within the unit are presented below.
According to the official specifications, the Tcase of the Core i5-6500 is 71C, and the BIOS performance curves are set to ensure that the processor doesn't go beyond that even under stress. Therefore, we see very strange package power / at-wall power consumption in the pure CPU loading case. However, things do stabilize at a higher power number when both the CPU and the GPU are loaded together.
Another important aspect to keep note of while evaluating small form-factor PCs is the chassis temperature. Using the Android version of the FLIR One thermal imager, we observed the chassis temperature after the CPU package temperature reached the steady state value in the above graph.
We have additional thermal images in the gallery below. The chassis temperatures are not a big concern even under extreme loading conditions.
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Lukart - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
That pricing looks really good! Now I want to see this thing listed..JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Might have been interesting and possibly worth a buy if it included 2 Intel Ethernet ports, to act as a pfSense box. I guess I'll pass.A5 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
You don't need a 65W CPU to do pfSense.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
$739? For that money you can buy a i5-6300HQ notebook that comes with a 960M. Even if you dont use the screen, you still get to make use of the built-in UPS of the notebook.ganeshts - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
The $739 is due to our choice of components - the Core i5 is $204, the SSD is $317, the RAM is $57 and so on.. people can budget for these components differently (using a SATA 2.5" drive could bring down that price by $250).t.s - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
And where is the sata port?nightbringer57 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Looks like there are two mounting slots under the mainboard.There doesn't seem to be a standard SATA connector, but there is a connector marked "SATA 3" (on the edge of the board, between the back USB connectors and the "chipset"). I'm assuming this is some form of non-conventional SATA port that combines data and power lines as there is no traditional PSU, but the converters must be on the motherboard, and enables to use a proprietary cable to connect the drivers.
nightbringer57 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
(addendum)If you look at the bundle photo, you can see the weird-SATAoid-thingy-to-standard-SATA-adapter in the small plastic bag.
The_Assimilator - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Well spotted, for a while I thought ASRock had given us a pair of 2.5" mounts with no way to use them...zodiacfml - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
Right. I did a quick math and the price of this mini is reasonable. In my opinion, this is the only mini that I found with a decent price as most small PCs reviewed here are not cost competitive to a laptop.The price also reflects the simple quality of the case but who cares. The niche of this product is the decent price.